Memento Mori: A Birthday Wish
When Mother Calls Us Home
There are no requirements that a birthday wish be realistic, so I tested the terms and conditions by asking for something I thought to cross the northern borders of absurdity into the land of impossibility. I wished that all suffering end. My wish floated away on the cigar smoke I blew towards the sky, aiming at no star in particular. My hopes that the Universe do me a solid by my next solar return lasted as long as the vapor, itself bound to the laws of reality. Perhaps another wasted opportunity.
I could’ve just asked for more money gained from more lucrative work earned to buy more expensive things I’ll hardly use. As if I could accumulate enough goods to overcome the despair I hold from my very commodification. Instead, my heart shrouded my judgment and my sensibility. After all, I was born on the first day of Pisces season and — as an omen that I would forever be a recovering procrastinator — a day after the late great “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” Audre Lorde.
Poet and scholar Sonia Sanchez wrote to Audre, beginning her prose as her poem to our mother and literary star Dr. Shirley Graham Du Bois and later to actor and activist Ossie Davis. In words that struck my soul like a bolt in the field Sonia opened, “Death is a five o’clock door forever changing time.” *
